This description relates to managing computations for hierarchical entities.
There are a variety of ways in which various entities within a computing environment can represent data that has multiple values. Some computing environments enable vector entities, where a series of values are stored in a data structure as elements of a vector. The vector entity can then be referenced symbolically within expressions by a single symbolic string. Some computing environments, such as spreadsheets, provide an explicit visual representation of a multi-valued entity as a row in a grid or table, or as the grid or table itself. In some computing environments, different entities can have a hierarchical relationship to each other, for example, where one entity can be associated with any number of “child entities” (also called “sub-entities”), and a given child entity can be a “parent entity” to other child entities.
To evaluate an expression representing a computation involving multiple entities, a computing environment may have a notion of “conformability” that determines whether that expression is legal (i.e., the expression can be evaluated without causing an error) or illegal (i.e., the expression cannot be evaluated without causing an error). In particular, conformability may determine whether or not different entities can be operated on in a particular way within an expression. For example, in an expression in which a first vector is being added to a second vector, conformability may require the two vectors to have the same number of elements (in which case the second vector is “conformable” to the first vector).